Climate change is a lifestyle disease

Posted: August 31, 2015

Type: In the News

As more people begin to talk about climate change as a serious health issue, doctors, nurses and other health professionals will have an important role in helping people understand how a warming planet might threaten their health.

Clinicians can be a trusted voice of authority in the increasingly cacophonous public discourse on the subject. There is something else the medical community can bring to the discussion: our perspective on prevention.

Preventive health is based on the core idea of mitigating risk. Wouldn’t we all prefer for our doctors to catch a potential health problem while it is still a minor annoyance rather than a full-blown disease? Doctors can reduce patients’ risk for diabetes by monitoring their blood-sugar levels and intervening with the right tools and resources if those levels begin creeping up to unhealthy ranges.

With counseling, interventions and clinical best practices, doctors and public health experts are moving the dial on smoking, obesity and some of our toughest lifestyle-related diseases. We can do the same with climate change, if we take the same preventive approach to curing it.

What are the symptoms of climate change? Heat stress, injuries and death from extreme weather events; food and water shortages, and respiratory diseases, among other things. Asthma rates are increasing across the country. Here in California, emergency room visits for asthma symptoms rose by 18 percent between 2005 and 2012, according to state public health records. Studies suggest the impact of climate change on air pollution and pollen levels is exacerbating the problem globally.

What are the risk factors and contributing behaviors? Overdependence on fossil fuels and rising rates of air pollution. The severity of these threats may be at dire levels, but there is still time to make a difference.

Kaiser Permanente will add solar panels to an additional 100 medical offices, hospitals and other locations in California and purchase wind and solar power from off-site producers. Together these clean energy projects will provide 50 percent of the electricity Kaiser Permanente needs in California and reduce Kaiser Permanente’s greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent. The cost of this renewable energy is less than we’d pay otherwise. We have always seen climate actions like these as a natural extension of our mission to improve health.

Californians can do their part, too by:

Conserving water, because that also reduces energy used to transport water.

Climate change is a complicated subject, but here at Kaiser Permanente, as we would with all long-term health threats, we encourage people to join us in taking early positive steps toward prevention.

Kathy Gerwig is a vice president and environmental stewardship officer at Kaiser Permanente. She is the author of “Greening Health Care: How Hospitals Can Heal the Planet” (Oxford University Press, 2014).